The demonstrators stood in silence until a Whole Foods employee approached and politely asked them to leave. That's when the blindfolds came off and the chant of "Whole Foods is a lie; animals do not want to die," began. The group made their way through the store, drawing much attention from presumably socially conscious shoppers, as they walked toward the exit.
Is it normal to be so rich, yet so obsessed with money?
It’s not unusual, but yeah, this is pretty absurd.
Moreover, there is reason to suspect that the Clinton Foundation has served as a slush fund to finance the Clintons’ private enjoyments. The New York Post reported in 2013 that the Clinton Foundation had spent more than $50 million on travel expenses since 2003. Think about that: $50 million! That would cover a lot of the globe-trotting for which the Clintons are famous.
Today’s dissent by Justice Kagan in fish isn’t a “tangible object” case has the first Dr. Seuss citation in U.S. Supreme Court history.The citation in question was "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish."
Congress doesn't have to pass a new law to make this the test of employment. Federal agencies such as the Labor Department and the IRS have the power to do this on their own, through their rule making authority.For your own good, peasants. Your Uber ride to the airport is now $230.
They should do so. Now.
I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security on the basic Thatcherite principle that if you create a government bureaucracy in order to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of the problem. But I underestimated the creativity of our rulers: The DHS was set up because 19 Muslims flew planes into skyscrapers and killed thousands of people. Thirteen years later, the head of the DHS thinks his department's priority should be to "give voice to the plight of Muslims" who have the misfortune to live in America.I don't want to see another partial shutdown but I understand holding back funding for an immigration policy that a federal judge has now deemed unconstitutional.
Every Obama speech has a villain, and that villain is often other Americans who disagree with the president. He doesn’t hesitate to paint a very dark picture of the country he leads: citizens who are xenophobic and paranoid about Muslims, abusive police forces unfairly focusing on Muslim communities, a public eager to forcibly deport good Americans who just want to serve their country, and lawmakers determined to deny good education to children.Thus, in the recent summit on
Maybe Giuliani’s language is a bit overwrought or hyperbolic, but is it really that much overwrought or hyperbolic than Obama’s description of Americans who disagree with his policies? And if Obama consistently describes so many Americans as so prejudiced and mean-spirited… is Guiliani’s conclusion really that outlandish?
The Obamacare window technically just closed this weekend, but a new round of political headaches could just be beginning for the administration.Sorry, folks, but It's The Law.
That's because it's tax season, and many Americans could soon be getting an unwelcome surprise that they owe the government a penalty for skipping health insurance coverage.
That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model.Every time I read about mass movements like this, I'm always reminded of "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. A salient quote:
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.Last night on "60 Minutes" was a textbook model of the "true believer." It followed the brothers in the Charlie Hebdo attack:
As a teenager, Cherif was more interested in rap than religion. This video, shot by his friends, documents that period in his life when was he smoking pot and chasing girls. He worked as a pizza delivery boy, but his life changed in 2003 when he became radicalized by a group of young Muslims in this Paris neighborhood. They were angry about the American invasion of Iraq and set up a recruitment ring to send young French Muslims to fight jihad against U.S. forces.There you go: he went from an everyday kid, smoking weed and delivering pizza. Then, as Eric Hoffer might say, he was introduced to the devil he could believe in and give his empty life some meaning. It was a piece of cake to nurse that grievance straight into fanaticism.
I was at the point of ny speech when i was saying that often it is an illusion that we have freedom of speech in Europe.then we heard shots
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) February 14, 2015
Eurozone finance ministers’ first attempt to grapple with the bailout demands made by the new Greek government broke down in recriminations after the two sides failed even to agree a way to take negotiations forward after six hours of talks in Brussels.Six hours! I'm always amazed about these "talks" that go on for so long. What do they say after a while?
Politicians can be extremely generous to current workers by promising them spectacular and guaranteed payouts that will be covered by future taxpayers. But those days are ending. Again and again—and certainly in states such as Illinois and cities such as Detroit—those promissory notes are coming due and there's just no way they can be cashed.And when the pension bills come due, the general budget takes a hit. No more Parks and Recreation.
Maybe Williams is delusional. Maybe he is to anchors as Anthony Wiener is to wankers – a guy so cocksure he figures he can push it a little further each time.And now he's the butt of a thousand jokes:
So who will prevail: those who say a Grexit is bullish for the Euro as it removes tail risk and makes the Eurozone even stronger, or those who say a Grexit will lead to a plunge (controlled of course) in the Euro as the contagion risk never really went away, and now everyone will look to Italy and France, where anti-Europe movements have continued to rise from strength to strength, but nowhere more so than in Spain, where the Syriza peer, Podemos, is now tracking at top spot in polls.So now Spain is looking for the easy-peasy-Syriza way out of their debts. What a mess.
What stokes terrorism? There are lots of explanations, many of which focus on macro forces, like the politics of fundamentalist Islam and the uneven distribution of rewards in market economy. This past Friday at the Boston Athenaeum, Sarah Chayes offered a surprisingly different explanation: Terrorism, she argued, is an outgrowth of the daily humiliations that arise in corrupt countries.Here's the link to her speech at the Boston Athenaeum. Basically, her "Thieves of State" states that young and productive members of society get exasperated by kleptocracies and gravitate towards extremist movements.
Once elected, Syriza officials have been touring Europe, meeting serially with all the people they denounced as cruel, stupid, and wicked during the campaign, and discovering what an intelligent 10-year-old could have told them: nobody wants to give or lend them any more money because people distrust them and don’t see how the promises they have made to the voters can possibly be reconciled with any of the agreements Greece has made in the past.Apparently they're not making much headway by saying "Dude, I'm totally going to pay you back" followed shortly by "You used to be cool."
The commander in chief ought to argue for the defense spending necessary for national security, regardless of political considerations. The president is entitled, separately, to make his case for more spending on infrastructure, education and other domestic needs. We support both. But he would have more credibility if he acknowledged the underlying cause of the long-term squeeze on both kinds of discretionary spending: entitlement programs which, if unreformed, will channel larger and larger shares of the budget to the older generation, including the well-off, thereby triggering a vicious cycle in which interest payments on the growing national debt also swell. Mr. Obama used at least to acknowledge this as a problem. Now he seems content to leave it in the next president’s in-box.How much of the budget is going to mandatory spending? Nearly all of it:
The new budget projects spending $2.548 TRILLION just on MANDATORY programs like Social Security and Medicare. Another $426 billion will be necessary just to pay interest on the debt.The debt burden is manageable now because of low interest rates. But this is not going to last forever:
In total, this is over 99% of ALL the tax revenue the government collected in 2014.
In other words, they’ll spend nearly ALL of their current tax revenue before they write a single check for anything we think of as government (like the military, the IRS, or the light bill at the White House).
Naturally they’re not planning on turning off the lights anytime soon. So they finance the rest of it with… debt.
Currently, the government’s interest costs are around $200 billion a year, a sum that’s low due to the era of low interest rates. Forecasters at the White House and Congressional Budget Office believe interest rates will gradually rise, and when that happens, the interest costs of the U.S. government are set to soar, from just over $200 billion to nearly $800 billion a year by decade’s end.I've said this over and over: the United States "government" will be nothing more than a fund-transfer waystation taking funds from taxpayers and forwarding them to seniors, insurance companies, and banks. That $800 billion/year in interest on the debt doesn't buy us a shiny aircraft carrier or new bridges or even a Post Office jeep - it gets us nothing. But, as the WashPost notes, that's a can kicked down the road.
By 2021, the government will be spending more on interest than on all national defense, according to White House forecasts.
